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The heroine is back!

Psycho Soldier is the sequel to Athena, reviewed a couple of issues back, and is yet another SNK coin-op conversion from Imagine. This time the Amazonian wonder-woman appears on-screen as a cute schoolgirl with a pony-tail, which is a considerable improvement over her debut as a midget with a baseball cap. Even so, any resemblance between this diminutive sprite and the sultry strong-thewed beauty depicted in Bob Wakelin's cover artwork is laughably absent.

Once more Athena has been whisked into 'the demon-infested hell of an oppressed world', and once more 'the mantel of saviour has been placed upon her. Steeling herself against the unknown terrors... her stride, long and languid carries her into the shadows...'

Or to put it another way, she gets her dumpy little pegs moving and trots into a familiar scrolling platform scenario borrowed from all those Commando games we stopped playing about a year ago.

Though the screen display is a lot different from Athena, gameplay is in many ways similar. Our heroine scampers up, down and along the four horizontal corridors, dodging or destroying the approaching alien hordes, and banging away at brick walls whenever she gets the chance. These might hold valuable energy or additional bombs, or then again they might reveal nasty 'negative icons... especially the dreaded mushroom!' Don't say you haven't been warned.

There are apparently thirty scrolling screens of this stuff in each of the six stages of the game, and Athena's only got the woefully inadequate five lives in which to hop, skip and pulverise her way through each of them. Just for good measure, at the end of each stage there's an innocent-looking apartment block which sprouts ferocious gargoyles. Athena's got to demolish this virtually stone by stone before she can reach the next stage. Not easy.

What prevents Psycho Soldier from being abysmally average is the wealth of hidden features, and trying to suss these out should have you guessing for a while. Bombs, for instance, possess differing destructive power depending on the amount of energy that Athena has amassed. The occasional blue globe transforms her into an invulnerable fire-spewing dragon, and there's also a wild card extra life to be found on various levels. Perhaps these goodies were included at the expense of more mundane functions. The absence of a hi-score table is galling, and there's unfortunately no on-off toggle for the bland musak. And I wish the bomb release wasn't activated by the space bar even when you're using a joystick.

There's enough in Psycho Soldier to keep you engrossed for an hour or two, and Imagine promises a surprise ending 'you can't afford to miss!' I reckon that you can afford to miss it, and for your pennies you'll probably find more addictive and absorbing entertainment elsewhere, rather than in this worthy but unexceptional platformer based on a forgettable coin-op game.